Consortium Builds Cooperation Among Agencies

JournalNews :: 7.17.05 — As lines at social services agencies grow along with Butler County’s booming population, the pot of money used to sustain those groups hasn’t kept up, officials say.

Enter Joel Fink and Fred Valerius, the helmsmen at the Butler County Community Grant Consortium. The men are focused on working with social services groups to get more grant money from sources outside the county, while working to ensure that money will be used efficiently and to foster new relationships between the groups that they hope will lead to better services.

Valerius said the consortium’s efforts are not just about chasing after dollars. Because he and Fink work with so many different agencies, they’re able to see opportunities others might miss.

"Part of our job is to squeeze waste out of the system and look for collaborations and combining of forces so that the proposals are as efficient in their designs as they can be,” Fink said. “I think we’re uniquely positioned to be able to do that because we do have more or less a bird’s-eye-view.”

The consortium was founded in 2002 by a coalition of the Butler County Department of Job and Family Services, Butler County United Way, the city of Hamilton, Hamilton Community Foundation and the Legal Aid Society of Greater Cincinnati. Others that contribute to the consortium include the county’s Community Development Division, Butler County Children Services Board and Butler Tech.

“A little more than three years ago, we started thinking about what can we do to increase the resources in Butler County and we discovered that a lot of nonprofits we were working with didn’t have the wherewithal to hire grant writers,” said Bruce Jewett, director of Job and Family Services. “We pulled together our resources to write grants and instead of focusing on who was getting what portion of the pie inside the county, we focused on bringing in resources from outside the county.”

Now, Fink and Valerius are trying to reinvigorate those efforts with a greater focus on establishing new partnerships and efforts.

Building bridges

In the competition to win grant money and to stay afloat, Valerius said, some groups can get so caught up in chasing the money that they fail to touch base with others trying to achieve the same goals.

“You have a number of entities, each of whom is well-intentioned and doing the best they can, but not always working cooperatively and looking for ways to make the dollars go as far as possible,” he said. “We don’t have authority to make that happen, but through the grant writing process we can find those collaborations and make them possible.”

As an example, Fink said, a recent grant proposal to fund family drug court involved not just the juvenile justice system, but included representation from groups involved with mental health, substance abuse and children’s services.

“We thought we could help make that operation work better if more people were brought to the table around the writing of the grant,” Fink said. “It’s not that they were oblivious to each other before, but maybe they were not working as efficiently and maybe they weren’t doing as much planning together. That’s a major key in the grant world right now and it’s a place where the consortium can contribute.”

Maureen Noe, president of the Butler County United Way, said she appreciates that process as a funding agency. The consortium not only screens applications, but works to build up the applicant and to make sure the proposal will be efficient and sustainable.

“You can rely on that if it’s being proposed by the consortium, it has merit,” Noe said. “It has been through a screening process and has been drafted by professional grant writers and it meets a real need in the community.”

One bridge the consortium hasn’t been able to cross is the one over the Middletown city limits, which has its own similar group. Valerius said the Hamilton-based group continues to operate on a county-wide basis, regardless, and wants to work with the Middletown group.

That’s a source of frustration for Jewett.

“We hoped we would have a county-wide initiative here and tried to talk to all the right people in the townships and cities and after a lot of conversation, those folks in Middletown we had talked to decided instead of being part of our consortium, would duplicate their own,” he said.

Kay Wright, executive director of Middletown Community Foundation, said leaders at her foundation, Middletown city government and the local United Way office preferred to harness their resources in a way that benefited Middletown directly. The three entities joined in hiring a grant application writer, she said.

Wright by no means dismisses the possibility of joining broader county-wide grant endeavors in the future. But her first concern was that securing grants for diverse communities might dilute a grant writer’s efforts.

“Just the logistics of getting people to have time to meet,” Wright said. “How much time are you paying (the writer) to go back and forth?”

Her hope is that established grant programs may better blend one day.

“We do feel this has a lot of possibilities, a lot of potential,” she said.

Building capacity

The consortium works with the agencies during the grant writing process to try to strengthen their organizations as a way to help them get more grant money.

“We look at capacity building. We ask how are you configured as an organization? How have you thought of conceiving this project so it is maximally effective, so you can manage it, so it will look appealing to funders,” Fink said. “How do you build a budget? How do you build goals and make this more attractive?

“It’s not enough anymore to just write a tearjerker story and expect someone to hand you money.”

Boys and Girls Club of Hamilton Executive Director Karen Miller said she was able to learn from the grant writer at the consortium. The club has gotten three grants for a total of $31,000 this year through its work with the consortium.

“I think I’m a pretty good writer and I have had some successful experience writing grants,” Miller said. “But what I was able to learn from her was how to make it more attractive and how to use technology to make it more attractive. I think that will help me be more successful when I’m writing grants in the future.”

More buck for the bang

Though there’s a focus on working smart and starting new partnerships, Valerius said, there’s no mistake that the first priority is to get the money coming in from outside sources.

Fink said contributions to United Way campaigns are not keeping up with requests the group gets for funding and both voters and politicians have been reluctant to raise taxes to support public programs.

“That breeds competition in our world because there are more people out there trying to win these grants,” Fink said. “There are more and more groups dependent on that as a source of funding.”

In its work with county social services groups, the consortium has helped to bring in $2.6 million in external grants by contributing about $200,000 from in-county sources.

Steve Schnabl, executive director of Senior Citizens Inc, said a $4,000 grant from The Health Foundation of Greater Cincinnati with help from the consortium has made a big difference.

“We’ve applied that to our wheelchair ramp construction project,” Schnabl said. “They were able to put us in touch with someone at the foundation that recommended we be given something for our capital stuff. It was a wonderful surprise because we rarely have the money to make the capital improvements that we need.”

Miller said the grant money coming to her club came from groups that had never contributed. The money will be used to fund programs for art, nutrition and for books for the club’s advanced reader program.

“As unemployment increases and we’re also serving, for our organization, a larger Hispanic population that is under-educated and there’s a language barrier, we need to be able to identify more sources of funding,” Miller said. “We have been very dependent on United Way and we have developed relationships with government agencies. We have to have a much more diversified funding portfolio than we ever had before.

“They’re working very hard, but the Butler County United Way is not raising enough funds to provide all the needs in the community.”